I am new to modding the wii, and am looking to mod one of my consoles for my autistic son. Many of his games are getting scratched up, and I am having to re-purchase some of his favourite games because they get wrecked. I tried a google search and eventually found my way to this site. I have two wii's, one for each of my boys. I only plan on doing one wii to start.
I do have a few questions though.

1. Existing Saved Games
Since I've never played the wii, just my kids, how do I save the games that my son has played? I don't mean the disc, but his savegames of his characters and progress he has made in the games? Is this something that can be copied to an SD card, and then reimported back in to the wii, or does softmodding the wii not delete that?

2. My Console
My wii is one of the black ones, from about 2009 or 2010. I have purchased a newer remote with the integrated wiimotion plus in it. The console is updated to 4.3U. I hadn't considered modding it up until now (after I've spend 100's of dollars on games, and replacement discs). I have seen a few youtube videos of different mods, and I think for ease of use for my son, I'd like to be able to have each game (I only need to backup about 10) as it's own channel icon on the main screen. Is this possible, or do I need to use the coverflow app thing?

I plan on getting a few SD cards, a 500G USB hard drive, and downloading the files and getting all of this rolling. I have read over the guide a few times, and I think everything is pretty clear at this point. I used to mod PS2's back in the day, and I used a soldering iron for that. So I am looking forward to a softmod.

Lastly, I have purchased and downloaded three games from the wii shop emulator. Elevator Action (I played this when I was a kid), Super Mario Brothers Original, and Golden Axe. Am I able to save these to the SD card and put them back, or will they be unaffected? I guess it isn't all that big of a deal if I lose them. I can put them on my other console which I won't bother modding.